


To Make Dreams Truths

by sanguinity



Series: Langstroth on Bees [2]
Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: M/M, Post-Story: The Adventure of the Empty House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:46:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21689311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: Baker Street untouched at a remove of three years, and all Holmes' things just as he had left them — it could only have happened in a dream.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: Langstroth on Bees [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/931245
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	To Make Dreams Truths

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ColebaltBlue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ColebaltBlue/gifts).



> A quick little vignette to a prompt of Colebaltblue's. Title from a line of John Donne.

It was like waking from one dream into another, opening my eyes in the dark of night to see the oh-so-familiar shadow of my plane tree, cast upon my curtain by a gaslamp in the street. The shadow was at once so familiar and so strange: I had awoken in many dark nights to just exactly that sight, and yet it had been years since I last had. I lay there in the narrow bed, disorientated and half-dreaming, picking at the threads of memory. Had Holmes really come back from the dead, or had I only dreamed it? It was a curiously vivid dream, if dream it had been — if dream it still was — the kind of dream that I might spend half a morning disentangling from my _bona fide_ memories.

Had Holmes and I peered into Baker Street from the outside, watching a second Holmes turning in his chair before the window? Was Holmes even now on the floor below, turning in his bed, sleeping the active and stirring sleep of the living?

It must be a dream: there was too much that was improbable. Baker Street untouched at a remove of three years, all Holmes' things just as he had left them? That could only have happened in a dream.

I sat up, willing myself to wake even as I reached for Holmes' dressing gown, draped where he had left it over the foot of the bed. His purple gown, of course, which I remembered so well, wine-dark in the gloom; he had kept his mouse-coloured one for himself. I breathed deep of the gown as I wrapped it around myself: it smelled of shut-up rooms and Baker Street and, underneath both, of Holmes himself.

Could I conjure scents in a dream? I thought not, but couldn't be sure. When I had embraced Holmes in my surgery this afternoon, his scent, long forgotten but instantly familiar, had brought tears to my eyes.

I did not need to light a candle; waking or dreaming, I knew this room and my path through it too well. The floorboards felt real enough beneath my feet as I made my way to the door, as did the hallway runner. The balustrade underneath my hand, cool and smooth. The sitting room door. There was the bust in Holmes' chair, just as I had dreamed it…

"Hullo, Watson," it said, and I cried out as I seldom am able to in dreams.

"Why, my dear boy! I am sorry I gave you a fright," the bust said, and stood to light the gas.

It was Holmes who stood revealed by the gas light, his eyes dear and affectionate. He blew out the match. Still disorientated, I looked about for the bust: it was there to the side, lying beneath the broken window. I breathed a little more easily.

"I didn't know if I had dreamt it," I confessed.

He smiled, tender and grave, and came forward to take my hands. "I am here," he said simply. 

"Are you?" I asked, and lifted a hand to caress his face. The grain of his cheek, the line of his jaw… I traced his thin lips. He watched me quietly, his eyes shutting only when I felt the sweep of his lashes.

I reached up and kissed him then, and he permitted it. A dream, indeed.

"Shall that convince you I'm real, then?" he asked when I drew back, and the wry humour in his eyes did more to settle me than ought else. The world lost a little of its dreaming quality, and it was only Holmes standing before me, tired and worn, too pale and too thin from wandering the world.

I touched his face again, traced the new line etched deep into his cheek. His eyes shut on a sigh.

"It's you," I said.

"And you, as well," he replied, turning his face into my hand. His voice was breathless and quiet, as if he was the one who was dreaming.

This time when I kissed him, he returned it.


End file.
